My W&L class with Dan Wakefield

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Doug Cumming

Dan Wakefield, an American journalist, memoirist and novelist, died in Miami two days ago, March 13. I had met him when he came to speak to us Nieman fellows in 1986 or ’87. (Dan had been a Nieman Fellow 22 years earlier). Back then, he had just written a novel, “Selling Out,” inspired by his wacky experience in Hollywood writing the TV series “James at 15”). At Washington & Lee University, my colleague Kevin Finch encouraged me to get in touch with Dan, who was a friend of Kevin’s. On Oct. 31, 2018, he “visited,” by speaker phone, my class on “Civil Rights and the Press.”

From 1955-1960, Wakefield covered dramatic events around race and civil rights in the Deep South for The Nation. His articles from this period include “Justice in Sumner,” on the Emmett Till murder trial (September 1955), ‘Respectable Racism,” on the white Citizens Council movement (October 1955) and “Eye of the Storm,” on developments in the wake of the sit-in movement (May 1960). All three articles are included in the Library of America anthology, Reporting Civil Rights.

Wakefield led a charmed writer’s life, as one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best friends — both started writing for the student paper at Shortridge High in Indianapolis — and an observer of American life from the most interesting corners. When we talked to him, he was doing weekly readings in Indianapolis in a duet, “Uncle Dan and Sophie Jam,” with a young female saxophone player. At 86, he was funny, in full command of his storytelling gift, and generous with his time.

Here is a transcript of that interview. I hope you find it worth reading this entire transcript.

Prof. Doug Cumming: This is partly a demonstration of how to interview because these are freshmen, not necessarily journalism majors, though I’m in the journalism department. I’ve given them assignments to do at least one interview for a story or an oral history. And also, this is a class on the civil rights movement and the press, and I think we were all very impressed with the three articles we just read from your days with The Nation.

Dan Wakefield: Yeah. Thank you.

DC: As one of my students said, these are events that we’ve been studying – the Till trial, the white citizens council, and the sit-ins that began Feb. 1, 1960 – but we’ve never seen them written up with such flair.

DW: Yeah, well that’s great. You know one of the ironies to me, I’ve always said that the first sentence I wrote about the Till trial is the best sentence I ever wrote. I still think it is. And it’s too bad, because it was the first one I ever published. So all these years later I’ve never out-done it.

DC: Want me to read it out loud?

DW: Well, if you want to.

DC: “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”

DW: Yeah. I think that sums it up.

DC: The first question I want to ask you is to tell us about your creative life now, in what Walker Percy would call these latter days of the old USA.

DW: Well, I just finished writing a memoir of my goddaughter, who is a Cuban-American girl. I met her . . . I taught for 15 years at Florida International University in Miami, in the graduate writing program, and I met her family and I met her when she was 3 years old. And she’s now 23, and I just talked to her on the phone last night. And so that memoir has just gone out and is being considered, so I don’t know its fate yet. But I spent a lot of time on that. And then in recent years I’ve edited. . .first I was asked to edit and write an introduction to the letters of Kurt Vonnegut. He was a friend of mine and I’ve known his work well. We went to the same high school although 10 years apart, and then I edited a book of his graduation speeches, which are quite fun. And then just recently I co-edited a book of his complete short stories, which is 940 pages, and wrote an introduction to that. And I’ve also been doing some radio stuff. I did a thing on the local PBS station called “Uncle Dan’s Story Hour” and talked a lot about things I had written about and people I had met and so on.

DC: What is “Uncle Dan and Sophie Jam”?

DW:  Oh that’s another show we do on Monday  at a place call the Jazz Kitchen, it’s a nice dinner and jazz place in the city.  When we did Uncle Dan’s Story Hour I had this wonderful young saxophone player, a young woman who had been playing here in town, and I liked her playing so much I added her to just play a song at the break of that hour-long show, and then at the end. So when that year was done I said, “You know, Sophie [Faught], I don’t want to have to talk another whole hour by myself so why don’t we do a show where you play for a half an hour, and you get some other musicians, and then I’ll talk for a half an hour, so that’s what that is. . . She started playing here when she was quite young at a place, and then she played with a lot of good musicians, she played in Carnegie Hall in New York and had a chance to be a jazz musician in New York but she preferred to come back here and to have children. She has one little girl and she’s about to have another in December.

DC: You’re still shopping your manuscript around about your goddaughter?

DW: Yes, it just went out about three weeks ago.

DC: What’s the title and what’s her name.

DW: Her name is Carina and the title is “Down by the Bay.” The title comes from, really, a kind of kindergarten song, “Down by the bay where the watermelons grow.”

DC: Let’s go back to the Fifties. . . .How did you get the job and how old were you when you started working for The Nation?

DW: It was really a fluke and I’ve always said to people, especially people starting out in some kind of writing effort, you have to be good and you have to be lucky. And I was really lucky because, well I had started out in high school. I was sports correspondent for the Indianapolis Star in high school, and I happen to know some of the sports writers and then one summer in college I worked on the sports desk of the Indianapolis Star and then another summer in college I wrote letters asking for a summer job at 40 different jobs in America and I only got one, and that was from the Grand Rapids Press in Michigan, and so I took that. And I was a general assignment reporter there. My first job after college was on a weekly paper in Princeton, N.J., and that happened to be the place where Murray Kempton, who was a well-known columnist for the New York Post, lived. And he had just had his first book out. And I reviewed his book. I was really a big fan of his work. I reviewed his book in the local paper. And he called me up and said, “Well you really [decked?] the book, come over and have a beer sometime.” So I said, “How about this afternoon?” and anyway, I got to know him, and he was like a mentor for me. And in the summer of ‘55, every newspaper in the country had headlines and stories about this Emmet Till case coming up in September in Mississippi. And I said, oh my God if I could only get there and write about that. And so, just out of the blue, I called Murray Kempton and said, Is there any way, do you know any magazine that would let me write about that? And he said, “Well, The Nation asked me to write about it but I’m writing it for the New York Post, and I don’t like to write for two things at the same story, so I’ll tell them they should take you.” Well, I thought there’s not much chance of that. And I convinced him. I wished I had sometimes said what in the world did you tell them? Because the next thing I heard, he said, yeah, well go down to The Nation office and the managing editor will tell you what to do. And the managing editor. . .my payment for the story was a round-trip bus ticket from New York City to Sumner, Mississippi. That took about two days and one night. I stayed at a rooming house in Sumner, and covered the trial. And then, the trial was over Friday, and I was going to stay in the rooming house and write and Murray Kempton, who was there, said, no, it’s too dangerous. Come into Jackson. That’s where all the reporters are going to go. And I stayed in a motel in Jackson, Miss., over the weekend. I stayed up all night, and handed in this story Sunday morning. And you now, the way you filed stories in those days, you took it to the local Western Union office and they would send the story as a Western Union to the magazine. So that’s what I did, and I knew the story would appear on Monday, so I had to write it as if I’m looking back and the trial is over, which it was. So I just stayed up and did it. It was one of those events – it sort of had a form of its own. It started on Monday. It ended on Friday, and every day was very moving and very dramatic. You know, you just had to be alert and look at what was going on.

            I tell you, I was very naïve. I actually got there a day early and knocked on doors and said to people, “Hi, I’m from The Nation magazine in New York. What do you think about this trial?” It’s a wonder I didn’t get shot. But then I really almost got in trouble. . I’d heard that there was a witness. And I’d mentioned in the story a supposed witness named Leroy “Too-Tight” [Collins] being held in a jail, in a town called Itta Bena, and I’d heard that two of the sheriff’s deputies were going there, so I said, could I ride with them and they said, yeah sure, and I’d go about five miles out of town, they said, “Well, this is where you get off, boy.” And they let me off, and I walked back to Sumner.  And Murray Kempton said, “You’re lucky all they did is leave you off.”

DC: A lot of pretty well-known reporters were covering the trial. Do you remember John Popham with the New York Times?

DW: Yes. There’s a picture of me with him in a book of mine called New York in the Fifties. There’s a picture of me and Murray Kempton, and we’re standing at the press table of the trial, John Popham is below us, and he’s writing something, and he has a hat in one hand, and has grey hair. So I met him, and the guys from the Detroit News. There was even a guy from Paris there, I believe. It was huge, you know, packed into that little courtroom. It was filled every day.

And the press table wasn’t really big enough for all the press.

DC: The writing reminds me a little of H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the trial in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. You’re both coming in as outsiders, and poking fun a little bit but in a sensitive way. Who influenced your writing style at that time? Was it an editor at The Nation?

DW: No, not at all. At that point, I’d never met anybody at The Nation except the managing editor, who handed me the bus ticket. If anybody, it was Murray Kempton. You know, he later won the Pulitzer Prize when he worked for Newsday on Long Island. But he was a very revered journalist in New York City for many years. He wrote three times a week in the New York Post. I couldn’t wait to get it, everything he wrote. He was a great stylist.

I think when I re-read the piece, I like the fact that it’s very direct. There’s nothing fancy about the style. It’s just trying to observe. I just re-read it this morning. And you notice that I talked about the color of Mose Wright’s suspenders and blue pants. All those things are obviously things you learn to do if you read good writing and read good journalism.

DC: Exactly. The details. So, Jack Eason of Bowling Green, Ky., who worked on his high school newspaper, has a question for you.

Jack: In your piece that we read, about the Citizens Council meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, you talked about how members of the Council, as you were leaving, tried to run after you and pull you from the car. Were there any other times when you were reporting on civil rights when you felt that you weren’t safe, or you were endangered?

DW:  No. I think I was, in Sumner, Mississippi, when I was with those deputies, but I wasn’t aware of it until they had let me out of the car. No, that’s the only time. I tell you, it made a huge impression on me. Because when those guys started following me, I was at the meeting and then they were yelling at me, and I got in the car, and they were grabbing at me, it was the first time I felt, “Well, this is what it’s like when someone is attacking you as a symbol, you know? I remember when they said, “We know who you are,” I said, Well, I’d be glad to tell you and I turned around to shake hands, and they said, “No, no. We know.” They didn’t know anything about Dan Wakefield. They just knew I was a guy from New York who was writing about them and therefore I would be writing something not favorable. And I thought, well this is a tiny case, a very tiny sense of what it must be like to be a black person in this country, and somebody you know starts grabbing you, or attacking you, or beating you up or shooting you not because of the person you are, but because of what you stand for.

DC: Jack has a follow-up question.

Jack: You spoke a little to this, but could you describe more what their attitude toward northern reporters who were reporting on the civil rights movement was. . .Were they that hostile all the time, or was that an exception?

DW: It was always hostile, except one . . I will say, except one experience that struck me, I’ll never forget. I was interviewing a guy who was the head of the white Citizens Council, I think it was in Montgomery, Ala., and usually, you know, this was in the days before tape recorders. There were no tape recorders. You wrote everything down. So he’s talking and I’m writing. But what I do a lot of times is the guy says something really outrageous, I wouldn’t write right then. I would pretend I wasn’t writing and then later I would write it down when he started talking again, because I didn’t want him to realize I was writing down some terrible stuff. What he was saying to me. This guy was saying something about the goddam blacks, whatever, and I stopped writing, and he said, “Write that down, boy.” [laughs] “Okay.”

I remember he had this kind of jovial air about him. He said, “Well, you know, you and I don’t agree, it’s just like Macy’s talking to Gimbel’s.” Those were the two big department stores. They were rivals. His sense of his opinions and all the rest, he just saw it in some sort of joking way.

DC: You were in Montgomery just when the sit-ins began, we’ve read a lot about this. That was just when L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner there, sued the New York Times in what became a landmark Supreme Court case. But you just happened to hear L.B. Sullivan addressing — I think it was — the white Citizens Council there. You were a lucky guy. The right place at the right time. Another question from Nick Mosher.

Nick: I was doing a little research on you and I saw that in college you became an atheist but then in 1980 on Christmas Eve in King’s Chapel you came back to being Christian. I was just wondering what was going on in your life or in the church on that night that caused you to change your belief system.

DW: When I went back to church at King’s Chapel on Christmas eve? Yeah well it was a lot of things that sort of come together that night. And I think part of it was, I went there because – and I think I described this in the book – but I went there because I realized I had lived in Boston for a long time but I really didn’t even know where any churches were. I just hadn’t noticed that, where the churches were, so I looked in the Boston Globe religion page and it said King’s Chapel – this was for Christmas Eve – candlelight service and carols. So I thought, well that will be innocuous enough, you know, that won’t be any big preaching or something that I won’t want to hear. So it didn’t say that the minister would read little things in between the hymns, and you know the passage from a novel by Evelyn Waugh that was about the mother of Constantine – I think the novel was called Helena – and there’s a beautiful passage toward the end of the book, and she says “Pray for the latecomers to the manger, and those who were not that aware for a while and came late.” So I felt like that was addressed to me. And it was very powerful. But also, I tell you, I go to a church where I am now, I think that nothing will ever compare to – in my eyes – what King’s Chapel in Boston was like in that era. I don’t know what it’s like now. And it was so powerful on Christmas Eve. People who usually didn’t go to church went there, the church was packed, and everybody got out the hymnal and it started out with everybody singing  “Come All Ye Faithful, Adeste Fideles,” . . .and it was really very powerful.

DC: I remember when you were talking to us Nieman Fellows at the Lippmann House – either 1986 or ‘87 — . . .you had just written that novel Selling Out . .

DW: Yeah, that was a Hollywood novel.

DC: . . and you said you were going to that Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, [Society of St. John the Evangelist] and I think you were working on a book, a kind of spiritual memoir.

DW: Yeah, well that was the book the former questioner referred to, called Returning, a Spiritual Journey. And that came out in, I think, ‘85. In fact, I’ll tell you a funny story.

It came out on the Sunday before Christmas in the Sunday New York Times Sunday Magazine, and it was called “Returning to Church.” I came home from church that Sunday and had an answering machine, and I pressed the button in the message, and there was the voice of Kurt Vonnegut and he said, “I forgive you.” So we had a kind of running joke about that. Much later, I saw he had a poem in The New Yorker, and I didn’t know he ever wrote poetry. So I wrote him a card and I said, “I see you’re now a poet. I forgive you.” So that went on.

Maddie Smith: What was the most rewarding experience of your career?

DW:   [pause] Oh boy. Well, I think certainly seeing that first piece come out in The Nation was really astounding. . .and I think the other was my first novel because after I wrote a fair amount of journalism and my first book was about Spanish Harlem [Island in the City, 1959] and the publisher with Houghton Mifflin in Boston and I was living in New York. And after that, my dream had always been to write a novel. So I wrote 50 pages of a novel. My agent sent it to him. Because he had published a journalistic book on Spanish Harlem. And we didn’t hear for about a month. And then my agent called.  He said, well, Houghton Mifflin wants to pay for you to come to Boston for a day and night and they want to take you to lunch at [?], the fancy restaurant in Boston, and I said to my agent, Is this good or bad? And he said, well, it could be either one. It turned out to be bad. They took me to this fancy lunch and it was not my regular . . editor, it was the head of the company and the managing editor and the publisher, and they said, Dan, we think you’re a wonderful young journalist, but you’re not a novelist.

You know, I later thought, they could’ve just said they didn’t like that 50 pages. But “son, you’re not a novelist,” was really a blow. Luckily, I had some people who really believed in me. In particular, a wonderful poet named May Swenson. And I kept on trying to write a novel and made four or five more false starts, and then finally in 1968 I had written what was a whole issue of the Atlantic on the effect of the Vietnam War on this country, so I had a little money ahead of the game, because that became a book. So I decided, OK, this is it. I’m going to write the novel. It’s now or never. And the novel was called Going All the Way. It became a best seller. Vonnegut reviewed it in Life magazine. It was a great thrill, because that was something I’d always wanted to do. And had been told that I couldn’t do it. So of course I was anxious to send a copy to Houghton Mifflin. And then I learned they had also turned down Julia Child’s book on French cooking. They told [her] that it was too long and that Americans would never be interested in French cooking.

Anyway, I’ve talked about that before —  you know, them telling me I’m not a novelist. I always say the moral of that story is, Don’t let anybody else tell you who you are.

DC: I’m wondering, with this room of 14 18- and 19-year-olds. . . How old are you now?

DW: 86. I’m amazed that I am still sort of functioning in all the different ways, which is miraculous. Do a lot of yoga, that’s my advice.

DC: Actually, I just saw something in the New York Times, and it was What would you tell your 18-year-old self, you know, for people much older? And I thought about that, and I won’t say what I would tell myself. But what would you tell yourself?

DW: Well, there was something that I did tell myself. I just happened to see this quote. It was in some kind of library. It was a quote of Abraham Lincoln. And the quote was – and he had obviously given this advice to himself – and he said, “I will study, and get ready, and maybe the chance will come.” So, I’ll never forget when I got that assignment to do the Till trial, I thought of that quote. And I thought I was ready. I remember reading this thing about Michael Jordan talking about being in the zone when you’re playing. And he said, “You know, you can’t make the zone come to you. You have to be ready when it does come.” You know, you have to do all the preparation and get yourself in the condition that you’re ready to go with it.

DC: Well, I hope that’s what four years of a liberal arts education is supposed to be.  . . Where did you go to college?

DW: I went to Columbia and it was one of the greatest things. You know, later, when I got the Nieman, at the end of the Nieman year which, as you know, is a year at Harvard, it was the first time I donated to the Columbia alumni fund, because I was so glad I had gone to Columbia and not Harvard. I loved the Nieman program, of course, but I think Harvard is one of the biggest frauds in America. Because, at Columbia, the greatest professors, nationally known professors, taught their own undergraduate courses. Graded their papers. You could walk into their offices any time and see them. At Harvard, the great professors just came out on the stage and gave a lecture and disappeared and then you were taught by graduate students.

Anyway, I was very very happy I went to Columbia because I went to Mark Van Doren, the poet, he was from Illinois, and he had this middle-western accent so I felt at home and all my classmates were from New York and I remember we walked out of Van Doren’s first class and I said, God, Van Doren is great, and one of them said, “Aw, he’s too midwestern.” I said, “Yeah, that’s it.”

DC: You were present at Shaw University when SNCC was formed. You were in Atlanta when the women were trying to figure out how to keep the schools open. Now, looking back on those heady days of the Civil Rights Movement, what do you think about what’s going on now in our country as far as politics and race?

DW: [pause] I think it’s criminal. I hope everybody will read the book Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I know I don’t pronounce his first name right. You know, I was a friend of James Baldwin in New York and he told me some things I didn’t understand. I really came to understand them when I read the Coates’ book.

You know, the controversy I had had with Baldwin . . . one night at a dinner, he was talking about his younger sister and how she was 16 and she wanted to be a fashion designer and she was [?] and she was going to suffer, and somebody there said, yeah, well all 16-year-old girls suffer. And I said, yeah, all 16-year-old boys suffer. And [Baldwin] turned to me said, “You don’t understand.” And it was really painful, because I thought I did understand. And I really think I came to understand more reading that Coates book. That in addition to everything else, if you’re black in this country, you have the fear of your body being destroyed anytime. I mean, any policeman, as we’ve now seen on tape many times on TV, can take you out of your car and shoot you or put you jail for almost anything. And as you know we have the greatest mass incarceration of any time in our history and of any place in the world. And what’s happening now is politically . . .well, I don’t need to say it.

You know, some people said I lived through the McCarthy era, was that worse? I said, “No, because we had real. . .we didn’t have Fox News. So we didn’t have an alternative universe of facts. And we didn’t have the social media that allows anybody to, you know, vent their own hate and their own false premises. That’s my speech.

DC: Yeah, well that was awfully good, and we’ll have to end on that. You’ve really given us an amazing 45 minutes. I can’t thank you enough. I’m going to transcribe this and maybe I’ll send you a copy.

DW: Ok, thank you very much. I’m glad to talk to you. . . say hello to Kevin [Finch].

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Decatur Emergency Assistance Ministry (DEAM)

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Doug Cumming

In the pretty courtyard of dogwood trees on the ground floor of Holy Trinity Parish facing Sycamore Place, Decatur’s hungry and dispossessed arrive one or two at a time for help.

They are welcomed as expected guests, for most have made an appointment with DEAM – Decatur Emergency Assitance Ministry.  A greeter will take their names, then another volunteer will lead them into the pantry to “shop” for what they need, or help with rent or prescription bills. Unhoused people can pick up a meal in a paper bag.

DEAM is a consortium of local churches that operates here from 9 a.m. to noon on four weekdays (closed on Wednesdays for supply deliveries).  Some 60 volunteers make it work, including a number from Holy Trinity Parish. But DEAM could always use more volunteers, says HTP parishioner Pete Pfeiffer, the treasurer of DEAM.

DEAM began in 1977 with a push from two women, the Rev. Dorothea Gatlin of Decatur First Baptist Church and long-time public school teacher Mary Leila Honiker of Decatur First United Methodist Church. Local church ministers recognized the need for a more coordinated system of help for families with emergencies. In April 1984, it moved from the Lutheran Church of the Messiah into Holy Trinity, which has remained its home (for $1 a year) ever since.

The need is great, but seems at least manageable under DEAM’s well-run operation. In 2022, the agency provided the following services, according to Pfeiffer:

  • Food ($41,400 worth), clothing and personal hygiene items to nearly 5,000 individuals.
  • Emergency utility assistance to 910 households. The maximum grant was $750, with extra funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, but is now $500.
  • Emergency housing assistance totaling about $10,000 last year. None is available this year, without the pandemic funding it had last year.
  • Emergency prescription costs for 182 individuals with insurance gaps or no medical insurance.

Two women are the only paid staff, and they get more from the personal satisfaction than from per-day pay, a total of $19,315 plus benefits last year. Victoria Carter, the office manager, said starting as a volunteer after her husband and mother died in the same year saved her life.

Victoria Carter, DEAM office manager, and Peter Pfeiffer, the treasurer, close up shop after another busy morning.

“To me, it’s a privilege to be in a position to help,” she said. She also appreciates having the best group of people she’s ever met in her life. “They not only love the community. They love each other and love doing their work.”

Last year, $124,000 came in from the 19 churches in the consortium. A little less than that came in from individual and corporate donations. In addition, DEAM received in-kind donations, such as groceries set out on people’s front stoops – the Porch program – and had an $8,000 grant for pandemic-related assistance. That grant is gone, and other sources are expected to shrink this year, Pfeiffer said.

The way DEAM functions, with clients making appointments and choosing what they need in their emergency, “there’s no gaming the system,” Pfeiffer said.

“As we learned during the pandemic, the need here is far greater than what we give.”

This is from the Spotlight series featuring outreach ministries of Holy Trinity Parish, Episcopal, Decatur, Ga.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A mentoring program that needs volunteers

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Doug Cumming

Every Monday afternoon during the school year, Path to Shine brings adult volunteers together with a hand-picked group of about 12 students from Avondale Elementary School.

The goal is lofty. The students have potential for academic success, even for college and a fulfilling life in the community. But they are struggling.

Holy Trinity Parish’s Lindy Newman, who directs Path to Shine for Avondale, learned about struggling students long before in her first year of teaching elementary school. “So I started having lunch once a week with one child,” she said. “I’d bring in a sandwich and potato chips.”

It was transformative. The same slow magic can happen with the one-to-one relationships that develop in Path to Shine. For example, one bright but impulsive student used to pitch temper tantrums, but has turned out to be very personable, she said. Staying with the program since kindergarten, he now takes care of a younger kid.

Typically, the six or seven volunteers are retired teachers like Lindy. Most are not with HTP. But it began with HTP when a deacon from the Atlanta diocese, Leslie-Ann Drake, visited the church.

Drake realized, from her work in a women’s shelter, that children without resources need to understand how important it is to finish school, go to college and stay away from bad influences. She started Path to Shine out of a Baptist church in Smyrna. Today, after Drake retired and the program transitioned to be an independent nonprofit, Path to Shine is in 13 metro Atlanta schools. Marie Davis, the current director, is hoping to expand into many more schools in Cobb County.

With Father Gregg Tallant’s support, Lindy started the local Path to Shine. HTP thought it would be with Glenwood Elementary, across the street. But instead, it began at Avondale Elementary, 8 Lakeside Drive. With a declining student population that is 95% eligible for free and reduced lunches, the school needs resources.

When classes end at 2 p.m. each Monday, Lindy and another volunteer walk the Path to Shine students around the corner to Gospel Hope Church, the former First Baptist on Covington Road. The mentors – not “tutors” – follow a Path to Shine curriculum that includes reading aloud by the students, or by the mentors. They go outside for an activity, have a snack, do their homework and focus on the character-building traits the school stresses: kindness, responsibility, helpfulness and such.

New volunteers get two hours of training from the metro-wide program and about an hour of the state’s mandated training for abuse reporting.

The Avondale program’s greatest need now is for a volunteer who will start in the fall, usually a week after Labor Day, to discern whether to replace Lindy Newman as director the following year. In the fall of 2024, she’ll be ready to be a mentor only, not the director. And if she doesn’t find a replacement, she says, a valuable and well-running program might have to shut down.

This is from a “Spotlight” series on outreach ministries at Holy Trinity Parish, Episcopal, Decatur, Ga.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Worldview’ Cul-de-Sac

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Doug Cumming

A favorite book of intellectual conservatives is “Ideas Have Consequences,” by Richard Weaver, a University of Chicago academic who dug deep into a lost intellectual culture of his native South. In another book, “The Southern Tradition at Bay,” he unearthed a supposed alternative (Southern, without dwelling on the problem of slavery) to America’s soul-enfeebling forces of industrialism, capitalism and individualism. “Ideas Have Consequences” is more philosophical, an attack on the materialism, positivism and empiricism underpinning modern science and technology. It’s an appealing notion, but too abstract as an account of our complicated world today, or of human nature.

But some ideas do seem to have specific consequences, especially bad ideas that are packaged like candy-colored pills in a word or phrase. One of these is the idea of a “Christian worldview.” One dark and lonely night when I was driving home to the Shenandoah Valley from a Richmond hospital, I heard this phrase on a talk-radio show. My feelings were in a heightened state, alert to reality and divine presence as our daughter lay in that hospital recovering from bone-cancer surgery. Callers to this radio show, called “BreakPoint,” were complaining about various ways that schools were pushing godless and anti-Christian positions in American classrooms. Their generalizations bothered me, and much of their evidence seemed paranoid or flatout wrong. I had covered these sorts of classroom controversies as an education reporter. What bothered me more than the callers was the way the host accepted their stories uncritically, and then elevated them into his unifying idea that he called “a Christian worldview.”

The host, I learned during a program break, was Chuck Colson. Really? The lying SOB legal counsel of Nixon’s White House during that moral collapse in high places known as Watergate? Yes, that Chuck Colson. I knew of his born-again conversion to Christianity, because I had heard him about 30 years earlier explaining at the Atlanta Press Club how he had arrayed the arguments of C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity” on a legal pad, countered these with lawyer-like objections, and judged that his emotional conversion experience, on balance, was also intellectually valid. I’m a C.S. Lewis fan, so I identified with his thought process. Thirty years later, I knew that Colson’s time in prison had led him to start a Prison Fellowship that he saw grow into a national program that was doing good for a lot of inmates. This was real Jesus work, I was sure. “I was in prison, and you visited me.”

But listening to him spin out the resentments inherent in the concept of a “Christian worldview” angered me. I resolved to check out the callers’ assertions that he was accepting, and exploiting. “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” we like to joke about how journalists think. My doubts, later, checked out.

Colson died in 2012. His funeral in the National Cathedral honored, as it should, his good work through Prison Fellowship and his influence on George W. Bush’s remarkably sweeping fight against AIDS and HIV in Africa.

He was also responsible for pushing the notion of a “Christian worldview,” an idea that has had consequences. You can see it in our political divisions today, in the way entire churches of evangelical Christians can turn out any pastor they perceive as a “liberal.” Not that these “Christian worldview” folks follow the difficult Amish-style Christian tradition of “be ye separate” by actually leaving the culture of cars, TV, suburban enclaves, voting and shopping malls (unless it’s in a survivalist, militia-forming unit). Instead, there is now a subculture and mindset that fears what’s beyond their Christian bookstore readings, prescribed enjoyments and politics. Out there is another “worldview” that is unbiblical and lacking in moral absolutes.

“Chuck became convinced that it was absolutely necessary to develop a Christian worldview—a comprehensive framework regarding every aspect of life, from science to literature to film to politics,” wrote Eric Metaxas in “Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness.” Metaxas is a best-selling biographer pushing ideas that seem to come out of his assumption of “a Christian worldview.” So he interprets facts from this perspective. He says that Colson knew that the “real” cause of crime is not poverty or “race,” but a lack of moral training. He says Colson knew this by studying the writings of sociologist James Q. Wilson. I’ve read Wilson’s “Thinking About Crime” and took the course, “Crime and Human Nature,” that his collaborator Richard Herrnstein taught at Harvard when their book of that title came out. It’s true that these conservative scholars question environmental factors like racism and poverty as the primary causes of crime, but what they find instead is inherent factors like an individual’s impulse control, time-horizon and perceived consequences. These are behaviorist factors, not something from Colson’s ideology of moral decline.

Is it possible for Chuck Colson to be an authentic born-again convert and powerful witness for prisoners and prison-reform but also be wrong about “a Christian worldview”? Is it possible that the way Christians live in both the City of God and the worldly city has always been complicated, at least since St. Augustine’s day as Christians assumed civic responsibility in the decline of the Roman Empire? The Enlightenment ideas of liberal democracy, checks and balances, regulated free enterprise and equitable laws have been remarkably good for the country, and for communities of faith. Another good idea in that cluster of 18th century ideas is religious tolerance – the twin balance of the First Amendment, freedom of religious expression (the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1890s said that was only about opinions, not actions, and Justice Scalia oddly enough rolled back religious rights to that dry notion in 1990, prompting a huge bipartisan reaction called RFRA) but also freedom from religious establishment (e.g. prayer in public schools). We live in a pluralistic, multicultural society, thanks to these old time-tested ideas. Many forces of the 21st century are undoing trust in these liberal, democratic ideas and institutions, on the left and right. Colson’s idea of a “Christian worldview” was an early antagonist for eroding that trust.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Music School Scholarship Honors Former Student

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Doug Cumming

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Dec. 19, 2023

Sarah Cumming was a dedicated student of songwriting, singing, guitar and harmonica at the Frank Hamilton School, a music school in Decatur build around the vision of legendary folk music figure Frank Hamilton.

Sarah, who died on December 6 of a brain tumor, is being memorialized with a scholarship that will cover the full yearly tuition for a student at the Frank Hamilton School. The school, in the City of Decatur’s Legacy Park, offers classes in a variety of American musical traditions over six eight-week terms, each class costing $150.

Donations to the Sarah Cumming Scholarship will pay the $900 it costs for a year of classes for a student of any age who can’t easily afford it. A number of these scholarship could be available in the first year. Sarah’s parents, Doug and Libby Cumming, have committed to having at least one scholarship available each year after that.

Sarah Cumming, who was 33 when she died, discovered the Frank Hamilton School after moving to Decatur for treatment at Emory University. Because of seizures that began in 2015, when a brain tumor was discovered, she gave up driving and employment. But she refused to have cancer identify her life. (She also had bone cancer at age 14 and leukemia two years later, both of which were successfully controlled). She could walk to the Frank Hamilton School and was happy to join its community of students and teachers. Walking, writing songs, singing them, and being a special friend were her hallmarks.

The school, a tax-exempt 501 (c)(3) organization, has grown since its modest start in 2015 with lessons in a church. With the help of a few Atlanta business people, Frank Hamilton modeled the school on Chicago’s well-established Old Town School of Folk Music, of which Hamilton was the first teacher in 1957. Today, the Old Town School has thousands of students and can claim relationships with some of the biggest names in folk music. In the 1950s, Hamilton followed the model of Woody Guthrie, traveling, seeking out folk music and creating it with such Folk Revival figures as Guy Carawan, Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger.

Hamilton, who at 89 continues to be quietly at the center of the school as both teacher and student, has described his philosophy this way: “Music is not an exclusive club. Anyone can learn at any time regardless if they consider themselves talented or not.” The school adheres to a folk tradition of music learned in community, not as theory or rote technique.

To make a tax-deductible donation to the Sarah Cumming Scholarship fund, see the donation page of the school’s website, or mail a check to the Frank Hamilton School, 520 S. Columbia Drive, Decatur, GA 30030, indicating it is for the Sarah Cumming Scholarship fund.

###

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Prickle of Truth

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Doug Cumming

Yes, we need to be careful about saying there are multiple “truths,” your truth and my truth. But I know for a fact that there are these two truths – the truth of an individual and the truth of the statistical averages of which that individual is a tiny part.

These are the truths that you have to keep in mind, because they are irreconcilable and inescapable. In the aggregate, the quirky truth of quantum physics exists in the “illusion” of the furniture and airplanes and other stuff we see and feel. In these days of big data, public health, polling and social injustice, you run into these two truths in hundreds of ways. I could go into a dozen examples, but here’s one.

The statistical truth of every cancer, chemo and other therapy experienced by Sarah, our daughter who died on December 6, and the truth of Sarah herself. Maybe that’s what she meant by “the prickle of truth” in the end of her poem that seeks an elusive poetry of cancer, as opposed to its scientific truth. She put the poem on her blog, sarahtrainsbrains:

“. . . Beneath the shadow lies

Lonesome news, sorrow that weighs heavy. . .

And a weight you can bear for the prickle of truth.

It’s just a hunch, but other paths run cold

And you’ve got to keep running.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Unsung Hero

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Doug Cumming

Ed Davenport, a high school classmate, died on 9/11 this year. His family asked me to write this obituary, and later, to say a few words at his memorial service, which I was honored to do.

Edward E. Davenport, of Douglasville, the first Black student to graduate from Buckhead’s landmark public high school, North Fulton, died on Sept. 11 at age 72.

Ed Davenport and me at North Fulton Class of ’69 Reunion in 2019.

A retired mechanic for Delta Airlines, Davenport died suddenly at home after returning from Washington D.C. with his wife of eight years, Dina Ramos Davenport. They were in D.C. to have her Philippine citizenship restored (dual) when they immediately returned home because of his feeling weak.

Edward Earl Davenport, Sr., was born at Grady Memorial Hospital on July 11, 1951, the grandson of a prominent family in one of the last African-American neighborhoods to be pushed out of the Buckhead area in the mid-20th century. His ancestors are buried in the Historic Piney Grove Cemetery, an overlooked site between Canterbury Road and Georgia 400. He accepted Jesus as a young member of Pine Grove Missionary Baptist Church, the last building to fall in that small Black settlement, his family said.

Education drove Ed Davenport’s life. After attending Slater and Campbell Elementary public schools, he was at West Fulton High in 1966 when it had transitioned from a segregated white to a predominantly Black public school. His mother, Polly Mae Jones Davenport, troubled by turmoil at the school, asked for Ed to be transferred to North Fulton High, eight miles away. The principal suggested instead a traditionally Black public school, but his mother insisted on North Fulton, which was near the former Piney Grove neighborhood in the heart of Buckhead.

North Fulton, started in the 1930s, was one of the last all-white public schools in Atlanta, although one Black student, Jasper Austin, had enrolled in 1966 as an 8th grader. In 1967, Ed Davenport began driving a 1955 Chevrolet there as a junior, and graduated with the class of 1969.

He continued his education at Atlanta Area Technical School, where he was certified in electrical drafting and industrial engineering. He worked for Georgia Power as an engineer for 25 years and for Delta Airlines as a mechanic for 10 years. He also worked for two years in Kuwait and Afghanistan for ITT.

Davenport met Dina Ramos in Dubai in 2011 and they were married Oct. 14, 2014.

He enjoyed his life, his family said: fishing, attending Braves and Falcons games as a dedicated fan, and traveling with Dina. “Ed loved the city of Atlanta and its rich history,” his sister Dorothy Davenport said. “He was very proud of his great family history in the Buckhead Lenox area.”

His grandparents lived in that neighborhood for many years on West Road, which no longer exists. The road was named after his great-grandfather, Edgar B. West, who is buried, along with several great-uncles and great-aunts, in the wooded cemetery there.  

Besides his wife, he leaves a daughter, Latricia Dishawn Davenport Greene (Jeffrey Sr.) of College Park; a son, Edward Earl Davenport, Jr. (Anissa) of Stone Mountain; a brother, Willie Frank Davenport, and three sisters, Theresa D. Merchant, Dorothy V. Davenport and Pamala D. Copeland (Jimmy), all of Atlanta. He also leaves nine grandchildren, Darius Devon Davenport, Jordan James Davenport, Alicia Brielle Davenport, Coryn Skye Davenport, Kimi Amara Davenport, Jasmine Janae Greene, Jeffery Scott Greene, Jr. (Nikki), Jada Sierra Greene, Jalen Scott Greene, and eight great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a brother, Rodney James Davenport.

A memorial service will be held on Thursday, Sept. 21, at 11 a.m. at Alfonso Dawson Funeral Home, 3000 MLK Jr. Dr.

Doug Cumming and Ed Davenport, in alphabetical order in the Senior section of the 1969 North Fulton High School yearbook Hi-Ways.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A prison ministry

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Doug Cumming

“I was in prison, and you visited me.” – Matt. 25:36
 
Twice a year, in the gym of Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., the love of Christ pours out on more than 50 inmates selected to be in a long weekend retreat called the Kairos Prison Ministry.
 
Kairos is an international ministry in nearly 500 prisons in nine countries – but mostly in the United States, which holds the record for per capita prison populations. The lay Outsiders who have come to Phillips State Prison are from scores of churches of various denominations in the Atlanta area, including three men from Holy Trinity Parish, my home church here in Decatur.
 
Ron Stein, until the Covid pandemic, was involved in the follow-up program that brings monthly visits to maintain the Kairos community of prayer and fellowship after the inmates’ three-and-a-half day weekend. Pete Pfeiffer has been involved in Kairos for 25 years, starting at Lee State Prison when he was at First United Methodist Church in Cordele, Ga. Since coming to HTP, he has continued to be involved and he talks about it in adult Sunday school. The third HTP member, Tim Ball, who was inspired to join by hearing from Pete in Sunday School, has been involved in the long weekends at Phillips State Prison.
 
It’s an exhausting experience that Tim, at 77, is taking a break from now. He says the prayers, singing and small table discussions “about life” and its choices are a powerful release for incarcerated people. “Working in a prison where men had not been able to speak their minds and talk to anybody else, it’s just a wonderful experience,” Ball said.
 
The ministry is designed to maximize the experience of Christian forgiveness, community and release. It grew out of an older movement called Cursillo, or “short course” in the faith, which began with Catholics in Spain in 1948. In 1979, men of the “Fourth Day” (living into the commitments of their three-day Cursillo weekend) created a prison-appropriate version of a Cursillo weekend, which became the Kairos ministry. (“Kairos” means God’s moment, or “the fullness of time,” in the Greek New Testament.)
 
Kairos has various forms, for women and youth as well as men, and for one-on-one as well as the long weekends. One former inmate named Richard Jones, a friend in our previous church, Grace Episcopal in Lexington, Va., said his Kairos weekend was the best experience of his life. He remembers especially the Saturday evening when he received bags of encouraging letters and cards from people “who didn’t know me from a bucket of paint.”
 
“There’s so much love, you could cut it with a butter knife,” he said.
 
Ron Stein had always been curious about how prisoners survived. But curiosity changed to real relationships once he got involved, even though it remains “in the moment” without reference to the past or future. “I don’t just go for myself,” he said. “Some of these guys, their families have given up on them. They have no one else. . . I realized, we’re the only people who care about them.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

An Oregon Trek

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Doug Cumming

Oregon, for the last two weeks, took us to burned-over pine forests and evergreen mountains, Lavaland and the High Desert, dazzling cool days and 105-degree smog so thick the sun was like dried blood. We crossed the Columbia and we waded in the Pacific, beheld the World’s Smallest Harbor (Depoe Bay) and the nation’s deepest lake (Crater Lake).

We caught up with kinfolk on small farms in Rogue River to the south (Chris and Lisa Judson’s) and Ridgeview, Washington, to the north (Vern and Kelly Pick’s), on the Cumming side in Tigard (the Beckleys) and the Waring side in Salem (the Judsons).

Newspapers around here are dying, like one of the burned-over forests. A literary nonfiction writer selling her books at the Oregon State Fair wondered at my thinking the Oregonian had some fine writers. “Have you seen the Oregonian?” Lauren Kessler asked me. No, not lately. Up in Longview, the paper where Linda Wilson was on the Pulitzer-winning team for coverage of Mt. St. Helen’s eruption, is down to two reporters now, she told us. It’s owned by a hedge fund. So the news we get is mostly wide-screen entertainment from cable TV.

Not long ago, Oregon was a good place for newspapers. My friend Berkley came to one of his first newspapers in Bend, Oregon, arriving just after Ken Kesey’s “Bend in the River” festival in 1974. Berkley texted me information, like this: the mayor of Bend had been George P. Putnam, grandson of the Putnam publishing firm and husband of Amelia Earhart (we saw her plane in the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville). No relation, I guess, to another George Putnam who bought and ran the Salem Capital Journal from 1919-1953, who criticized a grand jury for refusing to indict a railroad president for attempted murder (and so was indicted by the grand jury for libel, and convicted and jailed until the Oregon Supreme Court overturned the conviction on free-press grounds). “The newspaper without enemies has no friends,” he wrote. In the 1920s, he attacked the Klan, which we learned in a walking tour was powerful in Salem, burning out the Chinese residents who ran the opium dens and had to stay underground until chased away.

The news is old here, more than three hours behind the East Coast, written in its own history. The Kalapuya Indians were settled long and peacefully in the Willamette Valley before the beaver trappers and traders, the Hudson Bay Company and Astors, the Methodist Missionary settlers who came up on the Lausanne around the Horn in 1839-40 (including Lewis Judson, my brother-in-law’s ancestor), Jason Lee and Thomas Kay the woolen-mill owner (his mill becoming Pendleton). The Oregon Trail families who made this a state in 1859. It was all spelled out and restored in the Willamette Heritage Center at Mission Mill on Mill Creek. (We had a good shade-deck lunch on Saturday at Ram Pub over the choiring Mill Creek tailrace).

And it’s older, in the volcanic rubble and obsidian wastelands, the startling blue water of vast Crater Lake, centuries of pure rainwater and snowmelt without earth’s successions. The soft woods and wetlands were well kept in micro-environments at Oregon Garden in Silverton, but the rides and crafts and 4-H contests at the famous Oregon State Fair were a glaring overlay of what humans can make of this world without nature, or nature domesticated and Western saddled. “Evolution is a lie . . .and here’s why,” said the banner over a booth there with a big plastic dinosaur. Looking around at the human Vanity Fair, I had to admit, evolution was no explanation for all this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Across the Fractured Land

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Doug Cumming

We flew for four and a half hours across the land, stuffed into a full Delta airliner four rows apart, no view of the land. No earbuds, no room to reach them in my shoulder bag under the seat, I watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” without sound. I could pay more attention to the camera angles (mostly no angle, straight-on symmetry) and “special effects” without the goofy music and dull dialogue. Check. The movie is just as pretentious, sluggish and enigmatic isolated as pure visual.

   Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a Theory of Man (as the science of homo sapiens would’ve been called in former times, before we cleaned up our language of gender and race). It’s remarkable to me that the most singular thing about the human creature, our web of connections through symbols of words, laws, rituals, faith, etc., is so little remarked on or understood. In “2001,” the idea that these things evolved is assumed in “The Dawn of Man” scenes, but these “things” of language are misplaced as “tools and weapons” (In a sense, symbols are our “tools and weapons,” but that is only a metaphor for a mystery.) The apes in these scenes discover using bones to kill prey for food, then to kill one another. A bone-as-tool becomes the spaceship a million years later, in 2001 Anno Domini. What caused the earlier evolutionary leap, and what will help us to the next stage? It’s a mystery, represented by the featureless black monolith. (The next stage, of course, is in Christ, the New Man, as we say unconsciously with “the Year of Our Lord” 2001.)

    Arriving in Portland, then brought to Salem in a car with windows hot to the touch (registered as a record-breaking 110 F outside on I-5), we eventually re-fueled on Chinese takeout and settled on couches to watch CNN and MSNBC for big news on a big thin-screen TV. The big news came right from my hometown, the familiar Fulton County courthouse where I went to settle Mother’s estate in 2017. The news was, in a sense, about us – as citizens of Georgia, we are the aggrieved party in The State of Georgia v. Donald Trump et al. 

    The grand jury indicted the former President and 18 others on racketeering charges. This is clever, to call what Trump tried to do openly and with the apparent agreement of his millions of supporters, a criminal conspiracy. All he did was to claim voter fraud, and use that claim to perform a kind of theater of pseudo victory. So? He’s an entertainer, a brand. But the purpose was to overturn the election of Joe Biden. To call this a “criminal conspiracy” is clever, and unique. What mobster was ever a former President, or ever acted so brazenly and publicly? (Well, maybe in a sense the populi always have a kind of amused moral laxity about knowing that famous gangsters were supplying them with bootleg gin, or like in Providence, that Raymond Patriarca was keeping Federal Hill safe using killer henchmen. Trump voters know he is “bad,” but they are amused and hope he might bring a more convenient order to their lives.) What is truly unique about this alleged criminal enterprise is that its purpose was to overthrow the outcome of a Presidential election. It’s not an exaggeration to call this an attempted coup, or the overthrow of American democracy.

    Back to that most human thing, our web of connections through language (the meaning of evidence, of logic, of facts and laws), the DA, Fani Willis, began by reminding us that all of the accused are presumed innocent. A grand jury looks only at “probable cause,” and needs only a majority of 23 (the equivalent of a unanimous jury of 12) and looks at only the prosecutor’s side of the story. A trial will be closer to “truth” as a contest, with rules and rights favoring the defendants. Proof must be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Trump doesn’t have to take the stand. But can he stand that silently, missing his campaign rallies?

   The breakdown in language, in meaning, is a sign, like the 110-degree F on the car windows. Something is terribly amiss. Was this an attempted “coup,” an attempt against American democracy? Was this a “criminal conspiracy” and is Trump the Godfather of thugs? I don’t think we all agree on the meaning of these words. I don’t think we all agree, even, that the Fulton County Courthouse, with all its rules of evidence and procedure, is the proper place to resolve our differences on this. Within families, our solution is “Let’s not talk about politics.” Or religion. Or the news. We certainly won’t talk about politics when we visit relatives nearby, with a brother’s ex joining us. And here, with my Democratic in-laws, all the talk is in agreement that the Republican Party is sick and doomed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment